Thanks for your note Rich;
I moved the jumper on the CD-ROM drive and now the BIOS sees the drive as the primary master. Also, the CF adapter is actually on the board itself so there is no issue with cable length.
I find that any time I boot with the 4G CF the before booting, the BIOS responds very slowly, even if BIOS is configured to boot off the CD-ROM first. Any ideas why so slow?
I noted that the 256MByte CF is formatted as FAT, presumably as FAT16, and the 4G CF is formatted as FAT32. I'm not sure what might happen if I attempted to format the CF as FAT16.
I also see other folks concerned about CF that is configured as "removable media" rather than "fixed media" and that in accessing "removable media" things are similar but not the same. I've also verified that the CF is configured as "removable media." The folks at SanDisk appear to make a point that their CF if configured that way. There is a DOS tool for configuring CF as fixed media but no luck yet.
Here is the dmesg. Ignore the comment about the Ethernet not being configured, as firmware.tcz isn't getting loaded first.
http://pastebin.com/46JJc5sfJonathan